In information technology management, enterprises are moving from physical servers toward virtualization, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud computing. Cloud computing offers a virtual environment, where several operating systems images are executed concurrently on the same physical server as VMs. System support monitors operation of a cloud computing environment and generates tickets for events causing problems to be resolved by system administrators. A virtual machine (VM) can encounter run time configuration problems, i.e., problems which were not known at the time when they were configured. Examples of such errors are a backup DNS server configuration, or a backup printer configuration (or some other shared resource or configuration attribute). If this configuration problem is encountered at a run time by a single VM, all other VMs attempting to use that shared resource will also encounter the identical problem. Similarly, if a single VM encounters a hardware-related problem on the machine it is executed on, for example such as an adapter failure, all other VMs running on the same machine and attempting to use that shared resource will also encounter the identical problem. Consequently, these VMs—or users associated to these VMs, or automated management functions associated to these VMs, or other human or programmatic agents corresponding to these VMs—will open multiple problem tickets due to the same cause.
Every open problem ticket has to be handled independently by system administrators, costing time and effort, even if that problem was resolved in the meantime. The inventors in the present disclosure have recognized that there is a need to consolidate problem tickets caused by the same failure in a compute environment, for instance, to save unnecessary work of system administrators or the like.